Day: August 22, 2008

I got to see Jeffrey Ross gear up for his new one-hour special with a couple of run-throughs during the Comic Strip Live 50-hour marathon, which happened a few days before the taping in June. So you can click on that madness on my site to relive my first thoughts about this special, which now gets its Comedy Central debut tonight at 11:30 p.m. It’s Jeffrey Ross: No Offense, Live from New Jersey. Here’s a clip before the...

How could downtown Boston not have a regular working comedy club?* That was the question I had when the Comedy Connection closed down at the beginning of the summer (yes, it has moved to the Wilbur Theatre, but as you can see from the schedule, it’s not so much of a comedy club as it is a mostly music and sometimes comedy theater venue). Enter Mottley’s Comedy Club. It opens Sept. 15 (Grand Opening night’s show is Sept. 19) in the basement of Trinity bar near Faneuil Hall and has a capacity of 100. The opening week’s schedule neatly coincides and partners up with the annual Boston Comedy Festival. The owner/operators are Jon Lincoln, Jeff Fairbanks and Tim McIntire. McIntire is a working veteran stand-up from the Boston area. Lincoln and Fairbanks, both Northeastern grads, previously opened and ran the Comedy Lounge in Hyannis for three years before selling off that operation to comic Mary Beth Cowan. Who is this Mottley character? Lincoln explains: "Back in the 1700s, there was a comedic actor named Joe Miller (died in 1739). He wrote tons of jokes and after he died a writer (by the name of John Mottley) compiled his jokes and wrote a book called Joe Miller’s Jests. The book became wildly popular and John Mottley continued to add more jokes to it until it had over 1,300. Mottley never...